1. Field
The present disclosure relates to a home appliance and its system, and more particularly, to a home appliance that checks and diagnoses its state and failure to send a diagnosis result in order to make After Service (A/S) easy, and its system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A home appliance may store setting values for operation, information occurring during operation, and failure information during its predetermined operation, (especially, it may output a predetermined alarm when a failure occurs). A user may therefore recognize the state of the home appliance. Such a home appliance may notify a simple operation completion or a failure occurrence, and also output specific failure information through an output means such as a display means or lamp.
Typically, a user contacts a service center when a home appliance breaks down, and then, a technician personally visits the user for repair. However, such a personal visit by a technician causes excessive costs and also, without prior information on the home appliance, it is difficult to repair the home appliance effectively. Later, with the development of technology, a telephone network is used to remotely diagnose failure information.
European patent application no. EP0510519 discloses a technique that sends failure information on a home appliance to a service center via a telephone network with a modem connected to the home appliance. However, in this case, there is a problem that the modem needs to be always connected the home appliance. Especially, since a home appliance such as a laundry washing machine is generally installed outdoors, there is difficulty connecting the laundry washing machine to the telephone network.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,105 discloses a method of controlling a home appliance that converts information on the operation of a home appliance into a sound signal and outputs it through a telephone network. Such a control method sends a sound signal outputted from a home appliance, to a service center through a user's phone. In terms of the structure of the data packets constituting the sound signal, the information to be transmitted into a plurality of packets for output. One packet is configured with a 2.97 sec duration, and when one packet is outputted, the next packet is outputted 730 ms later. Accordingly, outputting all the information to be transmitted takes more than 3 sec.
A portable terminal, such as a mobile phone or smart phone, provides a noise canceling function. When a signal having a predetermined frequency is continuously detected for a predetermined time (about 3 sec), such a noise canceling function recognizes the signal as noise. Furthermore, the sound signal intensity is drastically reduced or distorted by a communication environment when the sound signal is inputted to a portable terminal, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,105. Even when an idle period (for example, 730 ms) is set between packets (each length configured with less than 3 sec), the signal may still be recognized as noise. For reference, U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,105 provides no suggestion or recognition of the noise canceling function of a portable terminal, let alone a method of evading the above issue.
Therefore, it is necessary to provide an improved means for transmitting as much data on a home appliance as possible simultaneously in order to reduce signal loss or distortion due to the communication environment such as that caused by the noise cancelling functions of communications devices such as mobile telephones.